Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 40, No. 67.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2026-06-22 08:06:10+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: repetition

Malcolm Bull, writing in a 1995 review of Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of
Kasch (LRB 17.2), notes this author's anatomy of repetition:

"The crucial question is whether ... [repetition of ideas] reinforces or 
diffuses their significance. Calasso distinguishes between two types of 
repetition: that which ‘converges toward a single meaning...’, and that 
which eventually ‘makes it lose all meaning and leaves it at our feet 
like the opaque shell of a sound’."

In another piece from the London Review of Books (I cannot find it), its
author asks if repeating something again and again may be the only way
to get to its truth. Then there's Philip Glass, who remarked somewhere--
I think in his memoir, Words Without Music--that those who listen closely 
will hear the slight variations in his repeated musical phrases, and so get 
what he is doing.

Our smart machine is of course all about iteration, endless iteration.
Might there be an analogous point to be made about paying attention to
the odd slips, the anomalies (a.k.a. 'hallucinations'? Of course the machine 
is up to what its programming tells it to be up to. But as it gets more and 
more human discourse to iterate, might not those anomalies reward us with
a glimpse of a different kind of intelligence?

And then there's biological repetition...

Who, by the way, writes most insightfully about repetition?

Comments?

WM

--
Willard McCarty,
Professor em., King's College London;
www.mccarty.org.uk


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